Festival Weather!

Hay Festival is known for mud - not as much as Glastonbury, but mud, none the less. Experienced Festival goers bring wellies, and shops in town often sell out of these essential items. There's even a Festival umbrella!
So, today it was raining. The Festival bunting, strung up all over town, has not survived well. All down Castle Street there are empty strings across the road, and paper triangles scattered up and down. I mean - paper. They might have guessed that they wouldn't last long in this climate.

So today they had the Fair on the Square, with live music and a Victorian merry go round and a street performer with a unicycle. Vintage Visions has set up in the empty bit of Golesworthy's, some sort of women's group from Abergavenny selling vintage dresses and so on. Open Door at the bottom of town near the Globe has a photography and local crafts exhibition. The man who makes little windmilly things out of old tin cans is just across the river again; there are mini gypsy caravans and other wooden things over there too, but I haven't been able to get over to have a proper look yet. Artisans of Hay were in the Buttermarket today, with silk scarves and carved wood and fun sculptures of sheep and chickens and dogs, among other things. Marijana is showing her avant garde book covers at St John's. John Richardson has surrealist collages and sculptures at Oxford House Books. The Honesty Gardens are full of food stalls and all sorts of other stalls selling crystals and hemp t-shirts and doing massage, and playing chess, and there's a 'leading psychic', and the usual teepee, where they're doing face-painting for the kids.
And Islay got patted by lots of small children as I took her round this morning.